Thursday, February 20, 2014

But at least I don't have a moment to spare to reflect on our sad, dangerous, out of touch and corrupt government ,. , ,

Okay, so I've been away from home, and will continue to be so until the end of March. Very little time available to think of anything consequential, midst all of the child care going on. I think child care used to be easier forty years ago -- I don't remember it being this tiring.

As for the rest, well, the first part of February about the most exciting thing we did was watch the snow fall. Now, the most exciting thing I'm doing is watching the snow melt.

I have become quite good at putting a little four month old baby to sleep, thus earning the name, "Mr. Excitement."

The only problem now, is that I cannot either stand or sit without quietly rocking back and forth at the exact best rhythm to put a baby to sleep. Of course, I now resemble one of those poor wretches who sit and rock all day by reason of a brain injury.

I worry about becoming a head banger.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Hooray for Hollywood . . .

my bride and I watched Gone with the Wind a few days ago. It's a great old movie, made, I think, in 1942, maybe 1941. More importantly, compare it to nearly anything coming out from the movie industry in the last few years and I think it's clear that the industry has basically lost its way.

It's a matter of values.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Some people are irony impaired . . .

Some people in North Carolina intend to protest the requirement that voters show photo identification to vote. Showing ID = bad. Might suppress votes.

Of course, that is exactly what the id requirement is intended to do, suppress votes, that is, votes cast by people who are not eligible to be registered to vote, including "duplicate" votes of voters registered in more than one jurisdiction, disenfranchised voters because of felonies, and fraudulently cast voters of dead people, etc.

And that's why requiring I.D. is thought to be bad -- because no one knows what might happen or who might win, if the traditional ways of rigging election returns are eliminated. Why, if you allowed elections to be decided by only those citizens who took the trouble to properly register and vote, and you counted only those votes and reported the total accurately, well, that would be like telling citizens that their vote mattered. And politicians benefit from the cynical conclusion that votes don't matter. A citizen needn't bother to research the issues or character of the candidate, if his vote won't matter anyway. And if he does vote, since his vote probably doesn't matter anyhow he can do so confidently with little thought, because if it turns out his vote was foolish, it doesn't matter anyway, right?

Anyhow, here's the good part. To participate in the march to protest requiring photo identification to vote, protesters have to show photo identification!

You can't make this stuff up. Makes you real likely to think highly of the political thinkers who thunk up this stuff.

In other words, they really thunk up the place.